He Who Shapes (10 page)

left mine in another world."

As she said it one appeared, already lighted, between her

fingers.

"It's going to taste rather flat," said Render strangely.

He watched her for a moment, then:

"I didn't give you that cigarette," he noted. "You picked it

from my mind."

The smoke laddered and spiraled upward, was swept away.

". . . Which means that, for the second time today, I have

underestimated the pull of that vacuum in your mindin the

place where sight ought to be. You are assimilating these new

impressions very rapidly. You're even going to the extent of

groping after new ones. Be careful. Try to contain that

impulse."

"It's like a hunger," she said.

"Perhaps we had best conclude this session now."

Their clothing was dry again. A bird began to sing.

"No, wait! Please! I'll be careful. I want to see more things."

"There is always the next visit," said Render. "But I suppose

we can manage one more. Is there something you want very

badly to see?"

"Yes. Winter. Snow."

"Okay," smiled the Shaper, "then wrap yourself in that

furpiece..."

The afternoon slipped by rapidly after the departure of his

patient. Render was in a good mood. He felt emptied and filled

again. He had come through the first trial without suffering any

repercussions. He decided that he was going to succeed. His

satisfaction was greater than his fear. It was with a sense of

exhilaration that he returned to working on his speech.

". . . And what is the power to hurt?" he inquired of the

microphone.

"We live by pleasure and we live by pain," he answered

himself. "Either can frustrate and either can encourage. But

while pleasure and pain are rooted in biology, they are

conditioned by society: thus are values to be derived. Because

of the enormous masses of humanity, hectically changing

positions in space every day throughout the cities of the world,

there has come into necessary being a series of totally inhuman

controls upon these movements. Every day they nibble their

way into new areasdriving our cars, flying our planes,

interviewing us, diagnosing our diseasesand I cannot even

venture a moral judgment upon these intrusions. They have

become necessary. Ultimately, they may prove salutary.

"The point I wish to make, however; is that we are often

unaware of our own values. We cannot honestly tell what a

thing means to us until it is removed from our life-situation. If

an object of value ceases to exist, then the psychic energies

which were bound up in it are released. We seek after new

objects of value in which to invest thismana, if you like, or

libido, if you don't. And no one thing which has vanished

during the past three or four or five decades was, in itself,

massively significant; and no new thing which came into being

during that time is massively malicious toward the people it has

replaced or the people it in some manner controls. A society,

though, is made up of many things, and when these things are

changed too rapidly the results are unpredictable. An intense

study of mental illness is often quite revealing as to the nature

of the stresses in the society where the illness was made. If

anxiety-patterns fall into special groups and classes, then

something of the discontent of society can be learned from

them. Carl Jung pointed out that when consciousness is

repeatedly frustrated in a quest for values it will turn its search

to the unconscious; failing there, it will proceed to quarry its

way into the hypothetical collective unconscious. He noted, in

the postwar analyses of ex-Nazis, that the longer they searched

for something to erect from the ruins of their liveshaving lived

through a period of classical iconoclasm, and then seen their

new ideals topple as wellthe longer they searched, the further

back they seemed to reach into the collective unconscious of

their people. Their dreams themselves came to take on patterns

out of the Teutonic mythos.

"This, in a much less dramatic sense, is happening today.

There are historical periods when the group tendency for the

mind to turn in upon itself, to turn back, is greater than at other

times. We are living in such a period of Quixotism, in the

original sense of the term. This is because the power to hurt, in

our time, is the power to ignore, to baffleand it is no longer the

exclusive property of human beings"

A buzz interrupted him then. He switched off the recorder,

touched the phone-box.

"Charles Render speaking," he told it;.

"This is Paul Charter," lisped the box. "I am headmaster at

Billing."

"Yes?"

The picture cleared. Render saw a man whose eyes were set

close together beneath a high forehead. The forehead was

heavily creased; the mouth twitched as it spoke.

"Well, I want to apologize again for what happened. It was a

faulty piece of equipment that caused"

"Can't you afford proper facilities? Your fees are high

enough."

"It was a new piece of equipment. It was a factory defect"

"Wasn't there anybody in charge of the class?"

"Yes, but-"

"Why didn't he inspect the equipment? Why wasn't he on

hand to prevent the fall?"

"He was on hand, but it happened too fast for him to do

anything. As for inspecting the equipment for factory defects,

that isn't his job. Look, I'm very sorry. I'm quite fond of your

boy. I can assure you nothing like this will ever happen again."

"You're right, there. But that's because I'm picking him up

tomorrow morning and enrolling him in a school that exercises

proper safety precautions."

Render ended the conversation with a flick of his finger.

After several minutes had passed he stood and crossed the

room to his small wall safe, which was partly masked, though

not concealed, by a shelf of books. It took only a moment for

him to open it and withdraw a jewel box containing a cheap

necklace and a framed photograph of a man resembling

himself, though somewhat younger, and a woman whose

upswept hair was dark and whose chin was small, and two

youngsters between themthe girl holding the baby in her arms

and forcing her bright bored smile on ahead. Render always

stared for only a few seconds on such occasions, fondling the

necklace, and then he shut the box and locked it away again for

many months.

Whamp! Whump! went the bass. Tchg-tchg-tchga-tchg, the

gourds.

The gelatins splayed reds, greens, blues, and godawful

yellows about the amazing metal dancers.

HUMAN? asked the marquee.

ROBOTS? (immediately below).

COME SEE FOR YOURSELF! (across the bottom, cryptically).

So they did.

Render and Jill were sitting at a microscopic table,

thankfully set back against a wall, beneath charcoal caricatures

of personalities largely unknown
 
(there being so
 
many

personalities among the subcultures of a city of 14 million

people). Nose crinkled with pleasure, -Till stared at the present

focal point of this particular subculture, occasionally raising her

shoulders to ear level to add emphasis to a silent laugh or a

small squeal, because the performers were just too humanthe

way the ebon robot ran his fingers along the silver robot's

forearm as they parted and passed . . .

Render alternated his attention between Jill and the dancers

and a wicked-looking decoction that resembled nothing so

much as a small bucket of whisky sours strewn with seaweed

(through which the Kraken might at any moment arise to drag

some hapless ship down to its doom).

"Charlie, I think they're really people!"

Render disentangled his gaze from her hair and bouncing

earrings.

He studied the dancers down on the floor, somewhat below

the table area, surrounded by music.

There could be humans within those metal shells. If so, their

dance was a thing of extreme skill. Though the manufacture of

sufficiently light alloys was no problem, it would be some trick

for a dancer to cavort so freelyand for so long a period of time,

and with such effortless-seeming easewithin a head-to-toe suit

of armor, without so much as a grate or a click or a clank.

Soundless...

They glided like two gulls; the larger, the color of polished

anthracite, and the other, like a moonbeam falling through a

window upon a silk-wrapped manikin.

Even when they touched there was no soundor if there was,

it was wholly masked by the rhythms of the band.

Whump-whump! Tchga-tchgl

Render took another drink.

Slowly, it turned into an apache-dance. Render checked his

watch. Too long for normal entertainers, he decided. They

must be robots. As he looked up again the black robot buried

the silver robot perhaps ten feet and turned his back on her.

There was no sound of striking metal.

Wonder what a setup like that costs? he mused.

"Charlie! There was no sound! How do they do that?"

"Really?" asked Render.

The gelatins were yellow again, then red, then blue, then green.

"You'd think it would damage their mechanisms, wouldn't